Apple's great luck here is that everyone thinks of social media primarily in aesthetic ways that are linked to ideas of social media that they don't like.
> there are no recommendations, no feed, no following friends, no status updates, no likes, no profiles, no stories, and no connection to Facebook at all.
So because Apple doesn't have, in your view, some of the above, extremely limited, set of things they have no social networking properties in your view. It's revealing that "no connection to Facebook at all" is of such prime importance in the determination of Apple's products not being social media that it is specifically listed here. You're arguing what makes a product social so clearly based on a narrow set of specific features that you have ill-will toward but not on questions of the actual social nature of the products.
Under your asserted set of features which define social media, Messenger from Facebook only fails on being associated with Facebook and having stories! WhatsApp only fails due to Status and being associated with Facebook.
Apple used to have a product that was formerly known as "Find My Friends". It's wrapped into an app now called Find My, where you can follow the locations of your friends throughout the world. It integrates really nicely with other apps in Apple's portfolio like FaceTime and iMessage. One of its key features is to notify you when a friend of yours enters/leaves a location. It's about as close to "following friends" as it gets. Now for you, I imagine that your argument is that you are following physical locations of your friends with this app, not broadcast digital content so it's different and is therefore not social media. This seems like an extremely narrow view of social media that ignores the "social" aspect. Hard to understand how anyone would assert an app called "Find My Friends" isn't social!
> Most importantly, no advertising since they actually make money off the products, which means no incentive for gaming engagement metrics.
Why is it that engagement can only be useful for advertising? If Apple packaged a whole bunch of terrible apps that no one wanted to use (ie had low engagement) into its OS, do you think the demand would be so high for them? I don't. Neither do you, I think, as you make clear in the next sentence:
> They want you to have a good time and sell you another device next year, not glue your eyeballs to the screen.
What do you think represents having a good time in iMessage? For me, I would probably measure it by repeated usage under some metric like sends. The more someone uses iMessage to communicate with other people on iMessage, the more likely they are to not want to leave the Apple ecosystem. This is a real phenomenon. The shame of being a green bubble is very real in some circles. If the functionality of iMessage didn't vary between in-network and out-of-network messages, it would be completely fair to suggest that iMessage is a "pure messaging app" in the sense that GMail is just an email service. On GMail, my emails go across email services and work the same way in any scenario. In iMessage, if you're a pleb on Android, I can't do dozens of things with you that I can when communicating to my contacts on iMessage.
> Since there is no “Apple social network” to be spoken of, there would be little reason to include them.
This is just false beyond your aesthetic assertions of what social media is! Game Center explicitly has a "friends" concept as does Find My. iMessage doesn't call your contacts friends but if you have an iCloud account associated to a contact what's the difference beyond aesthetic conceptions? You have a closed network where you can socialize with others.
If your definition of social media is "has the features of Facebook Apps or is associated with Facebook" then I get why Apple doesn't have social media properties. If your definition of social media is "closed ecosystem services that enable you to interact socially with chosen individuals" then Apple clearly has social media properties.